Dover Beach
by CreatorsOfWorlds
Summary: Your life, like your breath, moves in and out with the tide. Kisame-centric ramble.


_A/N - Kudos to anyone who gets the title reference; you will get a ninja medal. The invisible, intangible kind._

* * *

_**Dover Beach**_

_**o**_

_Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those "truths" we once believed._

_- Friedrich Nietzsche_

**_o_**

_Breathe in time with the ocean_, his father used to tell him. _A man doesn't let his anger, his emotions, control him. He lets the ocean take them away and gets on with the task at hand._

And Kisame would close his eyes and breathe.

He liked the ocean. He liked the rise and fall, the gentle spray on his face, the times when it was dark and dangerous and like a woman cheated of love; desperate and wild and heartbroken. He liked the quiet times when it would lap and whisper against stone and the sound was that of a mother telling her child _I love you._

Most children, he knew, would think that the ocean sounded like a mother.

Kisame thought that mothers sounded like the ocean.

He'd never had a mother and his father was only there long enough to give him a memory of quiet strength and an admonition and words that rolled like the sea on a clear, sunny day, before he passed away too and left him with nothing but himself.

Kisame breathed in and out and carried on.

He graduated near the top of his class, and on the day he killed his friend he sat on an empty barrel with his head on his knees. He listened to the ocean roll in and out and breathed in time with it.

He'd been alone in the world for quite some time when he found Samehada or she found him, and when her ragged desperation struck against his mind and she clung to him hungrily, crooning like a woman in the back of his thoughts as he cradled her in his arms, he realized that he'd never been in love in quite this way before.

Samehada was like a cat in her aloof pride, like a woman in her tenderness, like a child in her need for constant affection and hungry, always hungry. The relationship between a Swordsman and his Sword was as close as lovers, twice as demanding, and as easy as breathing, as easy as the ocean going in and out, when you were part of each other. Kisame found that he could be happiest when he was nursing her on his lap, when he was wielding her in battle, when he was touching her mind to mind and when they were being a part of each other. He became a little less human when he merged with Samehada, and that seemed to make some of the things he'd done a little easier to bear.

But time after time, he had to come back to the fact of his humanity, even in the face of the blood staining his hands; the cries and screams of his teammates; the sick feeling of betrayal in the pit of his stomach, the sheer, cool disillusionment with his world and everything that he'd believed.

He'd never regretted killing that daimyo, even though it had earned him his S-rank rating as a criminal; and he still felt the quiet, bitter ache in his heart which came from the faces of the men and women he'd seen every day twisting in betrayal.

Funny.

They told you that you'd get over it, after your first time.

You never did.

Strong and steady as an ocean wave, he'd hear his father's voice in his head, a man who had few principles and stood by those until his death. _A man doesn't walk away from what he's done; a man faces it head on. You'll do things that you regret; everyone does. Use those things to make yourself stronger, and no matter how much you have to lie to other people, never lie to yourself._

A good man, his father.

Kisame closed his eyes and breathed in and out with the ocean and when a dark-haired man with a glint that might have been inspiration and might have been madness in his eyes made him an offer, he accepted.

Peace.

Truth.

Hope for the future.

Pretty words, maybe too good to be true but there's the unmistakable ring of sincerity behind them, and maybe it's also time to try idealism for idealism's sake, because he's lost his trust in the men who sell their souls to the highest bidder. Peace might be an unreachable dream, although if anyone could bring it about Kisame would be willing to bet on Leader-sama and the dark shadow who stood behind him; but at least in the Akatsuki you could speak plainly and directly, and Pain had never tried to hide his beliefs or his goals.

Besides, it didn't take him long to see how often Leader-sama worked himself half to death in his unceasing care and attention to Amegakure and the people he loved, and the organization that was to him what children would have been to any other; and Kisame would never have agreed to work for a man who merely played at being a god.

Then one day there was a black-haired thirteen-year old crouched on the end of a weathered pier, and Kisame could recognize the resigned, dull misery in his eyes. He mentally cursed the kind of world that could take and bend until they broke children like the one who sat swinging his legs over the cool gray water.

He closed his eyes and listened to the ocean breathing in and out, and he breathed with it.

Samehada purred contentedly from where she was strapped to his back.

And he spoke. "I'm your new partner…"

* * *

_So there you have it. A ramble over Kisame's past, up to the point where he meets Itachi. _

_So, may I cunningly request that you review? It would develop your writing skills, boost my failing self-esteem, and give everyone else the illusion that we know what we're doing here. Everybody wins._


End file.
